103 - Processing Language in Social Media, with Brendan O'Connor

We talked to Brendan O’Connor for this episode about processing language in social media. Brendan started off by telling us about his projects that studied the linguistic and geographical patterns of African American English (AAE), and how obtaining data from Twitter made these projects possible. We then talked about how many tools built for standard English perform very poorly on AAE, and why collecting dialect-specific data is important. For the rest of the conversation, we discussed the issues involved in scraping data from social media, including ethical considerations and the biases that the data comes with. Brendan O’Connor is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Warning: This episode contains explicit language (one swear word).

Om Podcasten

**The podcast is currently on hiatus. For more active NLP content, check out the Holistic Intelligence Podcast linked below.** Welcome to the NLP highlights podcast, where we invite researchers to talk about their work in various areas in natural language processing. All views expressed belong to the hosts/guests, and do not represent their employers.